For he who loves and is little loved, or not at all, has no friend, be he of high estate or low, beyond nature, the deep-bosomed, the bountiful, the true; and on her he may lean, trusting, and know that he will not be betrayed.  And in time her language will be his.  But she will be heard alone when she speaks with him, and without rival, with the full right of a woman who gives all her love and asks for a man’s soul in return, recking little of all the world besides.  But not all know how kind she is, how merciful and how sweet.  For she does not heal broken hearts.  She takes them as they are into her own, with all the memory and all the sin, perhaps, and all the bitter sorrow which is the reward of faith and faithlessness alike.  She takes them all, and holds them kindly in her own breast, as she has taken the torn limbs of martyred saints and tortured sinners and has softly turned them all into a fragrant dust.  And though the ashes of the heart be very bitter, they are after all but dust, which cannot feel of itself any more.  Yet there may be something left behind, in the place where it lived and was broken and died, which is not wholly bad, though there be little good in this earth where there is no heart.

Moreover, nature is a silent mistress to all but those who love her, and she tells no tales as men and women do, and forgets none of the secrets which are told to her, for they are our treasures—­treasures of love and of hate, of sweetness and of poison, which we lay up in her keeping when we are alone with her, sure that we shall find again all we have given up if we require it of her.  But as the years blossom, bloom, and fade in their quick succession, the day will come when we shall ask of her only the balm and be glad to leave the poison hidden, and to forget how we would have used it in old days—­when we shall ask her only to give us the memory of a dear and gentle hand—­dear still but no longer kind—­of the voice that was once a harmony, and whose harsh discord is almost music still—­of the hour when love was twofold, stainless and supreme.  Those things we shall ask of her and she, in her wonderful tenderness, will give them to us again—­in dreams, waking or sleeping, in the sunlit silence of lonely places, in soft nights when the southern sea is still, in the greater loneliness of the storm, when brave faces are set as stone and freezing hands grasp frozen ropes, and the shadow of death rises from the waves and stands between every man and his fellows.  We shall ask, and we shall receive.  Out of noon-day shadow, out of the starlit dusk, out of the driving spray of the midtempest, one face will rise, one hand will touch our own, one loving, lingering glance will meet ours from eyes that have no look of love for us in them now.  These things our lady nature will give us of all those we have given her.  But of the others, we shall not ask for them, and she will mercifully forget for us the bitterness of their birth, and life, and death.